Friday, November 28, 2014

Outlaw Mike & family stay warm through the winter with heating oil, since we're too far out in the country to have natural gas mains near our home and besides, I don't like gas. For Americanos, by gas I mean methane of course, not petrol.

We have but a 2,000 litre tank under the lawn in front of our house, but still we need to fill it only twice a year, in February and November.

Last February I paid around 1,700 EUR for some 2,000 litres. Cripes.

Then last week when my wife woke me up saying I'd have to wash with cold water Outlaw Mike feared he would have to scrape the bottom of the money barrel again.

But no - imagine my surprise when my supplier left an invoice of only 1367 or so EUR for 1,935 litres! Well, okay, it's not that a boon of around 350 euros suddenly makes a world of difference. For the Clintons it might, poor bastards that they are.

But that don't mean we can throw with it either, so that little extra was more than welcome.

"...For big oil-consuming regions – America, Europe and Asia – the collapse in the price is a boon, which ought to provide a substantial stimulus to economies becalmed by deficient demand. In both Britain and the US, there is already evidence that lower fuel prices are helping to boost consumer spending and confidence.

Yet for many oil exporters, it is a disaster. Ever since the Arab Spring, there has been an unwritten understanding that the price required to keep the natives quiescent is $100 a barrel or higher. The benchmark for Brent crude is now down to $71, with every possibility, given the abundant supply, of it going as low as $50.

For a low-cost producer like Saudi Arabia, with its huge financial cushion of overseas assets to fall back on, this may just about be tolerable, at least for a while. For many others, it’s a living nightmare with massive domestic and geopolitical implications.

We shouldn’t mourn that much. Ever since its foundation back in the Sixties, Opec has been a brutally destructive force on the global stage, whose malign grip on oil prices has helped sustain some particularly unsavoury regimes. The best analogy I can think of for its influence is that it is a bit like having your interest rate policy set by a small caucus of self-centred outsiders, who pay little or no regard to wider economic needs.

....

This monstrous cartel, an organisation which in any other line of business would be hunted down and prosecuted, may now be about to get its comeuppance. By ensuring that the price stayed above $100 a barrel for much of the past six or seven years, Opec has sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Those sky-high oil prices are one of the reasons why the global economy has been struggling. There is even quite a bit of evidence to suggest they were a key factor in tipping the world into crisis in the first place.

The effect on the oil market has been both to depress demand, while at the same time encouraging the development of other, non-Opec sources of production – the most striking example of which is American shale. There is a sense in which Opec's hubris has created its own nemesis. This is not unlike what happened after the oil price shocks of the Seventies, when by hiking up the price, Opec similarly pole-axed demand and spawned a worldwide search for alternative sources of energy supply, including Britain’s North Sea. Opec lost market share on a hitherto unprecedented scale amid the consequent glut.

....

Admittedly, some big growth markets remain – notably China, where new car sales are running at around 1.5 million a month. There’s life in the black stuff yet. Even so, the once-fashionable idea of “peak oil” – that the petroleum would run out before we’d found alternatives, or at least that the low-cost supply was close to exhaustion, leaving the world dependent on much more expensive sources – looks ever more misplaced.

I’m not saying that the oil price will never again get much above $80 a barrel. Inevitably it will. There are, no doubt, at least another couple of cycles left in the oil market yet. Hydrocarbon consumption still accounts for around a tenth of global GDP, and much of the rest of it owes its existence to the transformative power of oil. It will be many decades before the world frees itself of this dependence.

All the same, oil is steadily losing its power to shock – and so are Opec and its Bedouin masters. This is an overwhelmingly positive development, and in a gloom-ridden world, a matter for some celebration."

Mr Warner is right. By keeping prices so high for so long, OPEC has shot itself in the foot, spurring the West to look for alternatives. A considerable effort has of course gone to false leads, like solar and wind power. Don't get me wrong - there IS a niche for these things, but they can never substitute for the substantial demands of our industry and infrastructure.

However, part of the search for an alternative to OPEC oil has ultimately led to the exploitation of shale oil. And now that we have discovered its abundancy, and developed a technology to extract it - fracking - there's no stopping it anymore.

This is very good news. Of course, the lower oil prices are a bad thing for the couple of decent OPEC members; Ecuador, Nigeria. As for the rest, I couldn't care less. Finally, there's payback for four decades of being in the claws, energy-wise, of deranged Arabs who f*cked up our economies for the first time in 1973-74 because those monsters were unable to live in peace with a small prodigious country harming no-one: Israel. From the US over Europe to Japan, we all had to pay dearly for the malignant whims of the oil sheikhs. Degenerated religious idiots who were themselves incapable of extracting the very oil they were sitting on. They needed western intelligence, engineering and management to produce their riches, and what did they do with it? Finance the spreading of their hateful islamic message throughout the world. That barbaric appeal was directly responsible for decades of terror, culminating in 2001 in two airliners plunging themselves in the WTC, their tanks full of dearly paid kerosene.

Payback time!

Of course this evolution will not lead to an immediate collapse of the Saudis & Co. Like Mr Warner observes, global demand is bound to increase, spurred by China and other major countries taking off. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is not the end. It's not even the beginning of the end.

But the West, and especially the US, finally being able to provide for its energy needs without having to beg degenerated terrorism sponsors - that's certainly the end of the beginning. A matter for celebration, certainly.

People associate property rights with greed and selfishness, but they are keys to our prosperity. Things go wrong when resources are held in common.

Before the Pilgrims were able to hold the first Thanksgiving, they nearly starved. Although they had inherited ideas about individualism and property from the English and Dutch trading empires, they tried communism when they arrived in the New World. They decreed that each family would get an equal share of food, no matter how much work they did.

The results were disastrous. Gov. William Bradford wrote, "Much was stolen both by night and day." The same plan in Jamestown contributed to starvation, cannibalism and death of half the population.

So Bradford decreed that families should instead farm private plots. That quickly ended the suffering. Bradford wrote that people now "went willingly into the field."

Soon, there was so much food that the Pilgrims and Indians could celebrate Thanksgiving.

There's nothing like competition and self-interest to bring out the best in people.

While property among the settlers began as an informal system, with "tomahawk rights" to land indicated by shaving off bits of surrounding trees, or "corn rights" indicated by growing corn, soon settlers were keeping track of contracts, filing deeds and, alas, hiring lawyers to sue each other. Property rights don't end all conflict, but they create a better system for settling disputes than physical combat.

Knowing that your property is really yours makes it easier to plant, grow, invest and prosper.

In Brazil today, rainforests are destroyed because no one really owns them. Loggers take as many trees as they can because they know if they don't, someone else will. No one had much reason to preserve trees or plant new ones for future harvests; although recently, some private conservation groups bought parcels of the Amazon in order to protect trees.

The oceans are treated as a commons, and they are difficult to privatize. For years, lack of ownership led to overfishing. Species will go extinct if they aren't treated as property. Now a few places award fishing rights to private groups of fishermen. Canada privatized its Pacific fisheries, saving the halibut from near collapse. When fishermen control fishing rights, they care about preserving fish.

Think about your Thanksgiving turkey. We eat tons of them, but no one worries that turkeys will go extinct. We know there will be more next year, since people profit from owning and raising them.

As the 19th-century economist Henry George said, "Both humans and hawks eat chickens -- but the more hawks, the fewer chickens; while the more humans, the more chickens."

(Sadly, even Henry George didn't completely believe in private property. He thought land should be unowned, since latecomers can't produce more of it. Had he seen how badly the commonly owned rainforest is treated, he might've changed his mind.)

Hernando de Soto (the contemporary Peruvian economist, not the Spanish conquistador) writes about the way clearly defined property rights spur growth in the developing world. Places without clear property rights -- much of the third world -- suffer.

"About 4 billion people in the world actually build their homes and own their businesses outside the legal system," de Soto told me. "It's all haphazard and disorganized because of the lack of rule of law, the definition of who owns what. Because they don't have (legally recognized) addresses, (they) can't get credit."

Without deeds, they can't make contracts with confidence. Economic activity that cannot be legally protected instead gets done on the black market, or on "gray markets" in a murky legal limbo in between. In places such as Tanzania, says de Soto, 90 percent of the economy operates outside the legal system.

So, few people expand homes or businesses. Poor people stay poor.

This holiday season, give thanks for property rights and hope that your family will never have to relearn the economic lesson that nearly killed the Pilgrims."

This is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a nineteenth century French socialist theoretician and anarchist. He is universally known as the father of the catchphrase 'La propriété c'est le vol': 'Property is theft'.

And this is Ujamaa, a book written by former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere.

Nyerere was indeed the father of the Afrosocialist socio-economical doctrine Ujamaa, of which the main hallmarks were the 'institutionalization' of social, political and economical equality, the nationalization of key economic sectors, and the forced villagization of local economies. The latter facet meant that collective farming was forced upon the people, who would then all receive equal rewards for their output irrespective of its quantity or quality.

Predictably, Tanzania went bust.

These are just two instances of the sickly, degraded utopian thinking that socialist 'scientists', demagogues and politicians have tried so hard to instill in humanity's global 'psyche' as the correct way to harness our powers for achieving a 'Great Society' on Earth.

Unfortunately, their message has always sounded far sexier than that Pilgrim story.

Had the Right managed to export essential ideas like the importance of property rights and a legal apparatus to enforce them, instead of letting the Left sell its Development Aid snake oil to generations while simultaneously sell the locals absurd notions such as collectivization, there might not even be a Third World anymore.

The older I get, the more I tend to think that us Rightwingers should start paying far more attention to some serious marketing.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

See all the riots, the flames, the destruction? It's always been there - correction, no, only since the sixties courtesy Earl Warren and the leftist destruction of the Black Family - but... when did the shit really begin to hit the fan?

From 2008 on.

Ever since that MONSTER was elected pResident of the United States.

Ferguson burns, and with it other places, because the Creep-in-Chief does NOT miss an opportunity to stoke the flames of racial division. Either it's Hispanics vs. Whites with abusive executive action, or Blacks vs Whites by unnecessary and wholly unhelpfully intervening in issues that should be solved at the local level.

Over at Pajamas Media J. Christian Adams has a good piece on the vile policies of the Divider-in-Chief and his mafiosi:

"When history remembers the Obama administration, the flames of Ferguson will light up our memories. It wasn’t just an AutoZone and Jade Nails burning up in the fires of Ferguson, it was also the “Hope” of 2008 going up in smoke.

Instead of hope, the age of Obama has been characterized by racial division and discord.

Obama and Holder commanded the police to behave themselves. The police behaved, and look what happened.

Last week, members of the New Black Panther Party were arrested by state officials for plotting to use pipe bombs against the St. Louis Gateway Arch and for purchasing guns in a plot to kill as many policemen as possible.

Notice it was state officials who made the arrests. The Washington Times had a no-longer-surprising quote from an Obama administration official characterizing the plot to blow up the arch and kill (presumably) white police officers as “not a serious threat.”

Why do avoidable subplots involving the New Black Panthers keep shadowing this president? From the time he marched with them in Selma in 2007, to this past weekend, there has been a strange ambivalence toward their racially soaked radicalism.

Why would an administration official say anything to downplay a gun and bomb charge against New Black Panthers? Better yet, why didn’t the Justice Department bring their own domestic terrorism charges against these New Black Panthers?

Critics will say all these questions about the administration coddling the New Black Panther Party are getting old and tiresome, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Obama and Holder stoked division, strife and anger in Ferguson, culminating in last night’s violence.

Sure, President Obama called for calm in Ferguson. But that was after the damage was done. Calls for calm came after Attorney General Eric Holder tripped the time bomb during his visit to Ferguson by meeting with activists and agitators and assuring them the administration was on their side against the police.

When Holder complained about the police, when Obama talked about problems with policing in the United States, everyone understood the administration’s loyalties.

President Obama’s call for calm in Ferguson provided the administration deniability that the administration bore any responsibility for the riots, even after Holder flooded the zone with swarms of FBI agents and Civil Rights Division lawyers to investigate the police.

The Obama administration led their legions to believe that if Officer Wilson was not charged, it was due to racial injustice, racial injustice Obama would help remedy one way or another. Holder and Obama made the protesters think their cause was just and correct.

It was no accident that President Obama named Vanita Gupta acting head of the Civil Rights Division weeks ago. Gupta is beloved by the radical left for her militant hostility toward law enforcement officers. It’s why another Justice Department lawyer, Karla Dobinski, who illegally railroaded police officers in Louisiana, still hasn’t been fired.

Today, Holder announced that a federal criminal investigation will be ongoing. Holder is barely telling the truth.

Here’s some news that I suspect the mainstream media will ignore. My sources familiar with what is happening on the ground in Ferguson say DOJ Criminal Section lawyers have been encamped in Missouri. Nevertheless, sources familiar with the federal process say federal charges are very unlikely due to lack of evidence of a crime by Officer Darren Wilson.

Maintaining the pretense of an expensive investigation, too, is another dual message. Just like calling for calm while stoking the protests, prolonging the promise of a federal indictment against Officer Wilson keeps the folks energized on the side of the administration. Obama will use their anger, for example, to implement anti-police policies at the Justice Department while he outlasts the short memories of the protesters."

There's two more years to go before this swine leaves office. In only three weeks since the clear repudiation of his policies in the midterms, he has managed to shake the country to its foundations by effectively acting like a dictator on immigration, and by stirring up the flames in Ferguson (and soon God may know how many other places).

I shudder at the thought of what this criminal is still capable of before he finally leaves the White House in January 2017.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

1.) In the 2006 midterms, the Republicans lost both the House and the Senate.

Forced by this new reality and tremendous pressure from the media, President Bush replaced Donald Rumsfeld as SecDef with Robert Gates, a man who was confirmed in his position with bipartisan support and who was so acceptable to the Democrats that Obama kept him as Secretary of Defense after the former winning the 2008 Presidential elections.

It was a clear example of President Bush reaching across the aisles after a serious defeat in the midterm elections.

As for Rumsfeld, he took the dismissal like a man, 'accepting a bullet in the chest' for the good of his country.

Rumsfeld's firing can be argued to be grossly unfair, since he had been a very effective SecDef. That he was ever mired in the so-called Abu Ghraib scandal was a disgrace, since in the bigger frame of things Abu Ghraib was a joke - a bad joke, true, but a joke nevertheless - that did not warrant affecting the career of a top minister. It was akin to firing John Ashcroft for prison guards molesting inmates in some prison in Dipshitville, and it should have been treated at the local, operational level - which means not higher than Brigadier General Karpinski.

But in this story, all of that is not the point.

The point is that President Bush made a serious effort 'to listen to the other side', however wrong that side was. The GOP was defeated, the President listened. And made concessions.

2.) Fast forward now to the 2014 midterms, in which the roles were inverted. On November 2, the Democrats received such a clobbering that the Republicans gained control in the Senate, as well as the largest majority in the House since 1946.Overall, they achieved the largest majority in Congress since Calvin Coolidge. FYI, that was in 1928.

Not only that, but simultaneously the GOP won two governors' seats as well as countless races on the state and local level.

These sweeping gains together actually accounted for the largest Republican majority in the entire United States in almost a century. As victories go, they were far more impressive than the Democrats' win in the 2006 midterms.

And that is what makes Obama's reaction so very interesting vis-à-vis Bush's one. As we have seen, Bush changed his policies - the Rumsfeld dismissal was possibly but the most obvious example.

Obama, by contrast, actually acts as if the midterms have not taken place. A President worthy of the title, would have shown the voters a De Gaullesque "Je vous ai compris" gesture.

Instead, by pressing on lightning quick with immigration reform and using executive action to push amnesty for roughly 5 million illegals through, he basically just flipped the general American public the finger - and a big one at that.

Don't look to European media to see Obama's latest abuse of power through this prism. Below, for instance, you see how our 'prime' newspaper De Standaard covered the issue:

The choice of the caption is so obviously a pro-Obama spin that calling this kind of coverage yellow journalism is an understatement. It's rather piss-yellow journalism, for it reads :'ONCE WE WERE FOREIGNERS TOO'. The author of the piece goes on to say that Obama effectively halts the 'deportation' of 4 (sic) million illegal immigrants, and promises 'a more just immigration policy.'

That the political mores in the United States require presidents worthy of that title to use executive action only with wisdom and above all, restraint, is apparently unknown to the De Standaard editor. That this one-man initiative is not only a slap in the face of every American who just showed contempt for Obama's policies, but just as well for every serious-minded immigrant who took, or takes, the trouble of going for the long, difficult, and legal way to become an American citizen, also does not cross the man/woman's mind.

There is yet another angle to look at Obama's appalling lack of respect with regards to the voice of the American voter.

On 17 June 1953, the East Germans rose up in defiance against Walter Ulbricht's de facto dictatorship in the laughably named German Democratic Republic. It was brutally put down by the Soviet military, with the full consent of the East German leaders. Reliable West German estimates put the death toll on June 17 at 513 people. 1,838 were wounded, and around 5,100 arrested. Of the latter, around 1,200 were later sentenced for 5 years on average to penal camps.

17 June was another clear repudiation of the government's policies, but unfortunately, in this case the government had the backing of Soviet T-34s.

This is the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht:

Following the uprising, he wrote the following poem:

"After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?"

I know, I know, there are those who say it's satirical. But with Marxists you can never be sure. In any case, it looks like, unable to digest the defeat of his cronies in the House and Senate, Obama is heeding the advice of a fellow Marxist.

Because, regularizing 5 million illegals means adding, oh, 10 million, no, make that 15 million voters to the American electorate ten years down the line. Because 5 million who are suddenly allowed to stay will mean that their relatives will have it that much easier to come over, and before you know it, they too can determine who sits in Congress and the rest. And of one thing you can be sure: they are NOT going to vote for the GOP.

The American people may just have elected another Congress.

But Obama, has in effect indeed...

... just elected another people.

Are you Americanos finally beginning to understand what this creature meant when he promised to 'fundamentally change the United States'?